Sonic Revolutions

Friday, 6/27/2025 – Sunday, 7/13/2025

Event location
München

Public event

Target audience
students, employees, publically, specialist audience

With the Heaven’s Carousel, composer and conceptual artist Tim Otto Roth has developed an expansive kinetic instrument: 36 spherical, illuminated loudspeakers rotate like celestial bodies in three wide orbits above the audience. After presentations for instance in Rome, Baltimore and Karlsruhe, Roth expands for the “Sonic Revolutions” his microtonal combinatoric repertoire with specially developed overtone compositions: sounds — among others from instrumental music — are broken down into their partials and recomposed by playing the individual overtones across the 36 loudspeakers.

Heaven’s Carousel

The Heaven's Carousel revolves from 27 June to 13 July 2025 every evening, starting at sunset. The compositions will vary during the runtime: Roth has developed a programme for the Kunstareal festival from 27 to 29 June under the motto ‘The scales are free’, which explores moments of freedom in music. To round off the presentation on the final weekend, a late string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven will be confronted with the new recomposition technique: “Beethoven meets Fourier” promises a hitherto unheard-of sound experience.

International Symposium

180 years after the experimental acoustic validation of the Doppler effect with trumpeters on a steam locomotive, the interplay of space, time and the composition of sound continues to occupy the arts and research. Alongside the presentation of ‘Sonic Revolutions’, Prof. Bernhard Seeber and Dr Tim Otto Roth invite you to a transdisciplinary symposium on 4 and 5 July, at which international experts from the field of acoustics will explore the phenomenon of moving sound with cultural scientists and artists. The symposium will be held in English and will also be broadcast on Zoom. The significance of space and movement for sound art will be explored in a public debate (in German) on 4 July at 8pm: Curtain up for the loudspeaker!

“Sonic Revolutions” are a collaboration project between Tim Otto Roth, the Professorship of Audio Information Processing, Prof. Bernhard Seeber, and the TUM Center for Culture and Arts. The project is funded by TUM University Foundation, DFG, Aventis Foundation and Sparkassenstiftung. The symposium is additionally financed by the professorship of Audio Information Processing.

Heaven's Carousel by Tim Otto Roth in front of the Alte Pinakothek, Munich photo: ©Andreas Heddergott /TUM — Heaven's Carousel by Tim Otto Roth in front of the Alte Pinakothek, Munich
photo: ©Andreas Heddergott /TUM

Spatial sound laboratory

Alluding to the ancient music of the spheres, the Heaven’s Carousel’s 36 loudspeakers orbit in three circles, emitting only sine tones or filtered noise. The actual ethereal sound is only composed through the interplay of the tone sources in the room. The special sound experience is enhanced by the changing pitches due to the speaker movement (Doppler effect). Depending on the location, a complex pulsating sound carpet is formed. The colour of the speakers indicate the pitch played in the spectral colours from red (low) to blue (high). The interplay of colour and sound reinforced by the choreographed movement turns the ensemble into an electro-acoustic music theatre.

Timbre combinatorics

As early as the 19th century, Hermann von Helmholtz used tuning forks to demonstrate that sounds and their characteristic timbre can be described as the sum of individual tones. The Heaven’s Carousel uses the same principle of additive synthesis with the sine wave generators in each speaker. The combination of different tone sequences with different intensities creates complex timbre patterns. In contrast to a large number of instruments whose sound is based on a fundamental tone and a series of overtones in integer interval ratios, Heaven’s Carousel is tonally freer and predominantly uses microtonal scales - a spectral music of the spheres of the 21st century.